European Academy of Sociology - Fellows

Prof. Dr. Karl-Dieter Opp

Karl-Dieter Opp is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Leipzig, Germany, and Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington /Seattle.  His areas of interest include collective action and political protest, rational choice theory, the emergence and effects of norms and institutions, and the philosophy of the social sciences. He has been a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study 1976/77, the Theodor Heuss Professor 1991/92 at the New School for Social Research, and a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation 1996/97. Since 2015 he is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Published books in English are:

• The Rationality of Political Protest (1989, Westview Press)
• (editor with M. Hechter and R. Wippler) Social Institutions. Their Emergence, Maintenance and Effects (1990, Aldine de Gruyter)
• (co-author, with P. Voss and C. Gern) The Origins of a Spontaneous Revolution. East Germany 1989 (1995, Michigan University Press)
• (editor with M. Hechter) Social Norms (2001, Russell Sage Foundation)
• Theories of Political Protest and Social Movements. A Multidisciplinary Introduction, Critique and Synthesis (2009, Routledge)
• Analytical Criminology. Integrating Explanations of Crime and Deviant Behavior (2020, Routledge)
• Advanced Introduction to Social Movements and Political Protests (2022, Edward Elgar)

He has written numerous articles that were published in scholarly journals such as the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, American Political Science Review and the American Journal of Political Science. Among other things, he is currently engaged in a book project on explaining collective political action, based on a four wave panel referring to the situation in East Germany in 1989, 1993, 1996, and 1998. His areas of interest include collective action and political protest, rational choice theory, the emergence and effects of norms and institutions, and the philosophy of the social sciences.